How To Quickly Create a Zip Files on Mac OS X

Creating archives is great for may reasons, they save space, and it’s a polite and easier way to send a group of files to someone else. Especially for those of you who want to send someone a lot of photos or files.

ZIP file Mac OS X

And just for information Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is.

The zip file format permits a number of compression algorithms. The format was originally created in 1989 by Phil Katz, and was first implemented in PKWARE’s PKZIP utility, as a replacement for the previous ARC compression format by Thom Henderson. Did you know Mac OS X can create .zip files natively with no need for 3rd party software or downloads?

Didn’t believe? Here’s how to do it in two easy steps.

First create a folder of all the files you’d like to ZIP.

ZIP file Mac OS X

Then highlight the folder, and navigate to File –> Compress in the top menu bar.

ZIP file Mac OS X

This will create a zip file in the same place as the original folder.

ZIP file Mac OS X

Easy isn’t it? Now you can easily send a single file or a bunch of files without install overly complicated software. Good luck!